The further I got from work this morning, riding home through the crisp air of a developing cold front, the closer to tears I got. Caught up in the business of work it was easier to keep a lid on my emotions but I ran, no exaggeration, from the city this morning. I legged it down the stairs across the lobby and onto the Triumph, grateful for its speed, though it has no horsepower compared to Keith's pride and joy. Police officers part company at the end of each shift with the injunction to "stay safe," an acknowledgement that some days someone somewhere is out to get you, and survival is a thing to be treasured. Other days the gremlins that take up residence in the cold dark places in the back of your mind are the insidious enemy of safety, not the crowds on the streets.
Keith and Daxo featured on Canine Extreme.
When Keith's room mate called at three this morning to tell us the county was sending help because he had tried to take his own life the entire universe shrank to an impossibly tight little dot, for a while, a place of enormous gravity and no action. We sat there in the room and let the planet spin on without us, our own officers on the street unaware and continuing their area checks and traffic stops and arrests. "Is this the police department?" A grating voice said from a long way away. "Get me somebody who knows how to answer the phone!" she screeched in my ear like a badly tuned violin and hung up before I could collect myself. Poor thing, she calls frequently complaining about aliens intruding in her life and we handle her with kid gloves, she is our neighbor and we try to help make sense of her chaotic world by reminding ourselves she knows not what she says. "Keith's dying!" I wanted to say but of course one can't, not in our world, we keep talking and hope no one notices the helicopter landing in the Lower Keys is for one of ours. She was merciless, but she didn't know that his life was slipping away through the fingers of the strangers trying to save him, to bring him back to a world he no longer wanted to be in. They were returning the favor he had done so many times himself to strangers that crossed his young path and demanded his all, which he always gave, as officers do.
There's the rub, twenty eight years old, his only ambition to be a canine officer out of high school in his home town, successful in all ways, cheerful, ironic, lanky and never too tired to exchange a joking word in dispatch. He was trained to work in our tight little room but he hated it. When we were short staffed and begged to be relieved for a short while he could hardly be persuaded to sit in the chair with his dog at his feet and be still. I who have lived most of my life rootless and directionless envied Keith his clear path, his inner certainty that being here and living this way were right for him. His path was working the streets of his city at night, grumbling, joking and sighing as officers, the world over, seem to be trained to do. I sat in the periphery of his world happy those nights he acknowledged my essential brevity by not calling up and sighing how much he hated wordy people on the radio. When Keith worked, I struggled to keep it brief. Now I wish, too late, I had blathered on and had one more chance to hear him vent, exasperated, how much he hated endless dispatches on the radio and too much talk, talk, talk. "Kilo Thirty Three, Signal Thirty One, Chapman and Petronia" was all he needed. One more talk from Keith on the value of brevity would mean the world to me. But it's too late for that.
Tonight we go back to work and do it all over again, and as they keep doing what they have to do that platitude will roll around my head all night long. "Stay safe" indeed. The greatest dangers are those that sneak up and grab you by the throat when your friends and colleagues are turned away and thinking you are safe, at home, living the life you were meant to live.
Stay safe Keith, and I hope dispatchers in the Great Beyond know how to keep it brief.
The US Postal Service is an institution I have long admired. Which puts me in a decided minority in the US, a nation that makes a national sport of mocking the postal system. I guess you have to have lived elsewhere to appreciate the USPS and its customer service attitude. These days the mails are transported by a semi-autonomous branch of the US government. As far as I can tell that means the postal service has to deliver the mails and not lose money because none will be forthcoming from the Federal Budget. I guess they will declare themselves a bank if they end up needing a cash infusion.
Key West has two post offices, a nondescript hole in the wall next to Winn Dixie in New Town and the main post office a splendid brick structure whose official address is 400 Whitehead Street, but it actually exists in park-like grounds wedged between Eaton, Whitehead and Fleming Streets:
The rear of the Post Office nudges up against the Truman Annex and its where the big trucks load up with the mails and haul them up to Homestead to be sorted. The weird thing is that of you post a letter to Cudjoe Key, 33042, which is served by the Summerland Key Post Office, the letter will go to Homestead for sorting and will come back down the next day for delivery, covering 200 miles to go 25...Whatever works I guess.
When I'm at work we often get calls from people living in islands ten or more miles up the Keys, convinced they do live in the city when they are far outside city limits. That's because their address reflects the fact they are served by this post office and are considered to be part of zip code 33040- the city of Key West.
When I used to live on sailboats the first thing I did when I settled in a city was to get a PO Box, it was my way of establishing residence and getting settled. In Santa Cruz, California, in 1983 there was a wait for a box as I recall, and I felt I had arrived when I got my slot in the main post office.
In St Petersburg when I got a slip at the city marina in Demen's Landing I was enchanted to discover my little brass box lived al fresco in an indoor-outdoor post office. Key West has a similar arrangement:
The fenced walkway around the front of the post office is usually open, but there are shutters that can be lowered ( in case of heavy weather of course):
This a post office subjected to massive rains too so the gutters and downspouts are solid. Too bad they aren't directed into some sort of receptacle to store the rainwater:
The post office has a light airy feel, its a place weirdly enough I enjoy visiting just for the hell of it. The parking lot is vast, and it has chickens too, but human visitors are strictly regulated of course:
The post office parking lot is very convenient to downtown and the postal employees get testy when people park there in the day and don't use the facilities, so cars do end up getting towed. After hours though it's a different story. There used to be a parking lot attendant at night who took money to let people park and boy, he was as mean as a snake. I never used to go anywhere near him. Now he's gone and someone else will have to claim the title of meanest person in Old Town.
That last picture I took on a night time lunch break, last winter. Always pretty the post office on Whitehead Street.
On the north side the front portico still looks the same as it did in the postcard, but the passage of time has given some trees a chance to sprout:
The passage of time may explain the apparent passive aggressive nature of the handicapped parking space. Give it enough time and the tree won't leave enough space even for a bicycle to park:
The Harris School started out in life as the equivalent of a high school I believe and ended it's educational career as an elementary school in 1980. Late enough to make mention of skateboarding which was quite popular back then as I recall.
The school building used to be surrounded by other cement structures of a 1950's or 60's style and they included the MARC house an acronym that has a rather dated flavor to it: Monroe Association for Retarded Citizens. They used to have splendid plant sales in back and I recall cycling Carstens Lane in the rear of the property and seeing rows of plants filling the back of the building. These days the land around the Harris School has been razed:
Somewhere over in the right side of the photograph there was also a culinary school and we used to get cheap high quality meals there, as guinea pigs for the high school chefs. It was a loss when they closed, and then there was the promise that the culinary school might re-open in the Harris building. That clearly didn't happen:
There were plans aired to hand the building over to a foundation for use as an "artist's colony" in the heart of the city but negotiations seemed to fall apart between Rodel and the school district. So the building languishes and sits there as sturdy as ever:
The walls look like they're made of stone are actually a kind of stippled cement. I've seen similar at the school district's facilities building on United Street. But for all it's solid Victorian air Harris School is sad and abandoned:
When negotiations were at their height a couple of years ago people standing on the sidelines expressed incredulous horror at the thought of the school being knocked down, as it needs huge amounts of work to be brought up to code and made usable. With the economy wobbling the way it is right now I wonder what possible use they can find for the pile. 
Modern libraries are so much more than simply book depositories it's hard to know how librarians manage their roles in society. The library in Key West, as it is so many towns is a refuge for people with no place to go, and as such it has become a sort of drop-in center for the dispossessed. It has computers to give everyone a chance to glean what they need from the Web:
The library is still mostly about books and reading, so we of course enjoy lots of heavily loaded shelves along with perhaps a seasonal theme:
But we have electronics to feed as well and the library is good place to stop by for a DVD, or if you are old fashioned they still have some video tapes:
They cater to youngsters and offer a room for their use, next to the meeting room at that end of the building which offers a space for lectures and movies and the like:
Despite the modern demand for electronic gadgetry the library holds firm on the no cell phone rule, pushing patrons out into the cold if they have to yell into the box in public:
The city-county library system in Monroe County has the usual problem facing public services in a county that is a hundred miles long and a mile wide in that there have to be lots of branches up and down the islands. I have used the Marathon, Big Pine and Key West libraries as well as the library at the Florida Keys Community College and found them all to be excellent refuges. And despite the usual lack of funds for a service that could improve the community immeasurably they do well with what they have.
I guess it is helpful for me that I work nights in that the hours do tend to serve the unemployed but library closings seem inevitable in our newly impoverished world.
In a city filled with retirees in winter the library is a hive of reading activities:
Some of my younger colleagues look at me in horror when I talk about books. "I don't read!" Belen announced proudly. So I looked at her and said: "The only difference between you and a dog is that the dog can't read!" which isn't original but she was annoyed enough to bring a book to work, on the Holocaust of all things. Illiteracy is something that is still often considered shameful but there's enough of it around that there are ads for volunteer reading coaches posted at the library bulletin board.
The library has always been a mark of civilization in a community and the fact that Key West's goes back in various guises at this location to the 19th century is a reminder that this was once Florida's biggest city. It seems odd nowadays to imagine that little Key West was the most salubrious town in a state plagued by heat, humidity, insects and illness. Key West was on the main shipping routes from the Gulf of Mexico and there was money to spare for a little culture in the town.
When I lived on the margins in Key West getting a library card was the ticket to comfortable living afloat. A library card offered free entertainment in a town that lacked NPR on the radio and that lost its free TV with the departure of the translator antennae up and down the Keys. I presented my card one day to withdraw a book and the librarian checked the address as they do. "700 Sailboat Lane?" I nodded holding my breath. " Hmm," she said looking dubious. "This sounds like a Cheryl live aboard special." I nodded acknowledging my address as the approximate location of the sailing club on Garrison Bight. I owed Cheryl a lot for her help and now she's died I can confess she weaseled me a library card at a most opportune time. She made the library a shore base for a lot of transient sailor and I think of her every time I visit.
The library is a handy place to park but overstaying one's welcome isn't a good idea. Its a county facility and there is usually a County Deputy hanging around ready to get scofflaws towed. On the other hand there is a rather decent little pocket garden next to the library which is a good place to hang when you do find somewhere to park:
The homeless population certainly seems to have shrunk this year. The garden was almost unoccupied much to my surprise:
How old fashioned.Not an electron in sight. We cannot however leave the library and this inadequate tour without a reminder that this is Key West, land of the million signs:
The notion that coughs and sneezes spread diseases seems rather quaint sixty years after the end of World War Two and it's public service announcements ("Careless Talk Costs Lives"). Someone at some point thought chickens were a public health threat and put up a sign to that effect. There are people who think chickens are a threat. Some controversies never die and happily the library will be there to keep us informed.
And i exemplifies the prettiness Key West is unique for in cities across North America. the fact is, its hard sometimes to remember that not everywhere is like this, narrow impractical and varied. The details make the lane worth noting: 
The contrasts are vivid. On one side of the lane there is this brand new development, of several units inside the refurbished building. My wife dragged me in for a quick look during an open house last year. Boy, were we shocked when the agent revealed an asking price of one and a half million US dollars. They appear to be sold, too:
And directly opposite we have this, on a more human scale altogether:
Johnson Lane continues the contrasting themes as it goes. Trim little Conch cottages:
And not one but two outdoor toilets awaiting removal. I figured apicture of one would be sufficient to make the point:
Houses awaiting the loving touch:
Parked next to renovations exhibiting all the refinements money can buy: off street parking...
...and carefully masked protuberances so vital to comfortable living but so visible in a crass way, normally. Not here:
Older key West:
And older Key West with a lick of pastel paint:
Off street parking is always valuable as you can tell from the narrow confines of a street like this. But what price an elderly tree like this?
